Page 92 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

MRC, its Biostatistics Unit and its Innovation Centre with the scientific inventiveness,
medical knowledge, technical nous, trialling thoroughness and marketing aspirations
of the Perinatal Mortality Research Unit, it was, in the words of its head, Professor
Hein Odendaal, a ‘very productive relationship’. 135
Less wide-ranging in the disciplines which its invention harnessed together – land
surveying, biomedical engineering and neurosurgery – but even more precise in its
outcome was the Cape Town stereotactic pointer, jointly created by the MRC–UCT
Biostereometrics Group and UCT’s Department of Neurosurgery in the late 1990s.
The pointer they created was used by neurosurgeons to pinpoint exactly where on
the skull to position a drill and orient it to perform brain surgery with maximum
precision. So effective was the pointer in making this possible, especially in resource-
thin settings, that it was patented and manufactured by a commercial company and
sold in three continents.

Reaching out: pupils of Bernadino High School in Scottsdene, Cape Town being shown how traditional
herbs were used to make Western-style medical capsules by Mr Joseph Nyelimane, a technician in the
Indigenous Knowledge Systems Programme, during the National Science Week, July 2010.

85